a man who bares a stranger's face
by egelantier
Summary: Dutch and Johnny take a Warrant to find a Scarback thief and meet Alvis for the first time. There are, of course, complications.


They're drinking in the Royale when Dutch's datapad chimes with an incoming Warrant. Johnny cranes his neck to read over her shoulder and whistles: Level Four, meaning that they must be moving up in the RAC world. She knew they would, sooner or later, but it's still gratifying to see.

A Scarback monk, whatever those are, ingratiated himself into a Company bigwig's house several months ago, providing guidance the guy's wife and daughter, and was by all accounts a perfectly saintly visitor up until the moment he stole twenty thousand joy and disappeared.

Twenty thousand joy and "a small datachip with some data of sentimental value we'd like to see returned," appended to the end of the Warrant carelessly enough that Dutch's fingers twitch in suspicion.

"Pree," she asks the bartender, "where would you look for a Scarback monk if you lost one?"

Pree raises one lethally elegant eyebrow and smiles at her. Sometimes he reminds her of the harem, which can mean _home_ or _danger_ , depending on what you're looking for, and this smile is definitely a mixture of both.

"Well, sugarplum, I'd go downtown and look for Alvis Akari there, and ask him if all his scarred lambs are accounted for. You can't miss him."

Johnny is already up, grinning at her. "Shall we?"

She accepts the Warrant and snatches up her coat. "Indeed we shall."

* * *

The Scarbacks indeed prove to be impossible to miss. She's been in the Quad long enough to have seen the men in yellow robes on the streets of Westerley, but never looked into it further; now, as they scan the information on the way, she can feel her eyebrows going up of their own volition. Next to her, Johnny is going quieter and tenser, and she wonders if he's squeamish, or if there's something more going on, but she leaves it be for a while.

There's a knot of people milling in one of the corners of the marketplace, and Dutch shoulders through and snags the nearest yellow robe owner. "I need to talk to Alvis Akari," she says over the intoned prayers, and the monk silently nods towards the center of the crowd.

She turns around and would jerk back in startelement if she was ever in the habit of allowing her body such liberties. The man suspended from the hooks is looking straight at her - no, past her; his eyes are blue and serenely empty, the eyes of somebody who's at once far away from his body and precisely grounded within it.

She knows the look.

"Our pain is your redemption," the monks intone, the crank turns, the coins ring against the alms bowl, and the suspended man smiles slightly, with just the corner of his lips. She waits quietly and Johnny waits with her, jittery and uncharacteristically silent.

Finally the prayer is over, and the crowd disperses. She's no stranger to pain, friendly and otherwise, but even she winces at the careless disregard with which Alvis Akari tugs the hooks out of his body and wipes the blood away, the skin of his chest and arms scarred into thick white.

He looks straight at her, and there's nothing serene about his eyes now, just careful, precise appraisal that makes her want to roll her shoulders, straighten her back. She licks her lips, then shakes her head. Work. Level Fourth warrant. Career possibilities. Moody partner. Right.

"Alvis Akari? RAC agents, we're looking for one of yours."

She's momentarily distracted by a spot of blood showing through his robe. She drags her eyes back up to Akari's face, and feels the tips of her ears heat a bit, because going by the man's smile, he _noticed_.

"One of mine? Why would the RAC concern themselves with our humble goings?"

"Twenty thousand joy is humble now? You priests think big," Johnny says, or rather, to her astonishment, Johnny outright _sneers_.

Akari just keeps smiling at her. "I'm afraid I still have no idea what you're talking about."

She shows him a picture in the datapad. "The Scarback named Tevildo had helped himself to a really big slice of Company's pie and disappeared. How does your doctrine feel about stealing from your own congregation?"

"In fact, it takes it seriously and as the ground for excommunication," Akari says, finally frowning. "I've not been aware of this, and I would love to help you. But I haven't seen Brother Tevildo for some time and I'm afraid I don't know where he is."

Johnny snorts next to her. "Convenient."

Akari turns to him. "It's customary not to ask a new member about their past if they can pass the initiation. But sometimes people find priesthood to be more than they bargained for, and slip away; we do not pursue such cases further."

Dutch says, "Anything you could give us? Is there anybody who's seen him recently?"

Akari shrugs his shoulders. "He's only been with us for about half a year, and he was a solitary man. Feel free to ask any of the brothers and sisters any questions you have, and they'll answer you."

He waves one of the monks over and whispers into her ear, and the woman nods and slips away. Akari inclines his head to them, politely, and walks away, the audience over.

She makes sure not to follow his retreating back with her eyes.

* * *

The next several hours prove to be ultimately fruitless. They talk to the monks, all of whom are, as advertised, cooperative but unhelpful. Brother Tevildo, yes, kept to himself, never talked about his past, never disclosed his whereabouts, came and went quietly. "Probably running from something," one of the monks says sagely, "but then, who isn't?"

It's early into night when they walk back, dispirited, and on the way she jabs an ungentle elbow into Johnny's side. "What crawled up your ass and died, back there? I usually have to keep you from being too nice to people, not from trying to bite their heads off."

Johnny squirms, rubs the back of his head. "Shit, Dutch, sorry, I'll keep a lid on it."

"It's not a big problem, but am I missing something?|

"I just hate faith peddlers of all kinds, okay?" He breathes in, breathes out. "When mom was sick, by the end, they honed in on her like fucking vultures. Incense and prayers and "have you just tried to forgive yourself?" instead of meds, slinking around the house all high and mighty, sniffing for money."

It's been months and she's still startled by how easily Johnny just goes and says things like this, shares the bits of his past without prevarication. Still feels awkward and bumbling when she receives them, unsure of what she can say in return.

She settles for an arm around his shoulders instead, and he leans into her and smiles, like it's enough. "And I can bet you a hundred joy Akari is lying. You just don't want to admit it because you'd like to tap that."

"Do not," Dutch says, with a somewhat shaky conviction.

"Sure you don't. Back to the ship?"

"I'll go talk to Pree again, ask if he's heard anything else. You?"

"I'll go talk to some people, see if I can score something off the street cameras. Lucy is trying to track the stolen money. By tomorrow something will shake out."

"See you in the morning, then."

* * *

Pree doesn't give her any new information, but provides her with a welcome nightcap. She's almost ready to leave, when he slides over a glass of high-shelf hokk that she definitely didn't order.

He nods at the table in the corner. "Making new friends in town, honeylamb? This one might just be more trouble than it's worth. Or maybe just enough trouble."

She looks over, and sure enough, Akari is there, saluting her lazily with his glass. She can feel her blood beating slow, anticipatory as she makes her way over, puts just a bit more purpose to her steps.

"Were my brothers and sisters courteous to you, Agent?"

"If you're buying me Pree's premium stuff, I'm thinking you could switch to 'Dutch'. And yes, they were, not that it helped much."

His eyes are half-lidden now, and she can't help but wonder if she can make him look the way he did in the marketplace again, chase him into that deep, old place.

"Alvis, then."

She never liked to wait much. "What does your doctrine say about celibacy, Alvis?"

"Nothing," he says, and leans towards her. "I can tell you something else about it, though."

She lets him lean close, cover her hand with his. "Tell me."

"Enjoying the pain," he whispers into her ear, "is not a requirement, for my vocation, but it definitely helps."

She laughs, quietly, twists, catches the lobe of his ear with her teeth. Over his head, Pree shakes his head apologetically, meaning that all the rooms upstairs are taken; she says to Alvis, "Let's go to my ship."

"Wouldn't your partner be unhappy with that?"

She should be angry at the presumption, but she finds herself weirdly touched instead, and answers honestly and not by rote. "Johnny is… important, more than anything else. But he doesn't have a say in who is welcome to my bed."

"Lead on, then," Alvis says, and she does.

* * *

Alvis isn't a pliant partner, not even after she's taken him apart. But it's fine, because she's not pliant either.

Dutch lets herself rest on his chest. It's a map of scars and stitches, and day-old bruises not yet faded. She added her own marks, using nails and teeth and the shallow dance of her knife. He looked at her with a kind of gratitude then. She had chosen well: sharp pain for him, controlled rather than vicious.

Now his eyes are closed, and his hand is steady on her back. It's somewhere between late night and early morning, and she's awake and content, feeling clean and lazy in a way only a really good fuck or a really good fight can provide. She'll sleep a bit, soon, and soothe Johnny's inevitable grouchiness in the morning, and they'll go back to the Warrant, but now…

The door of her cabin bangs open, and by the way she's not in the corner of the cabin with her knife in her hand she knows it's Johnny before she hears him.

He's disheveled and excited, and he's babbling. "...found the street recording with Tevildo, and he came into that one building and never came out of it, and you'll never believe who left the building instead. You totally owe me hundred joy, I told you Akari was lying - oh, _fuck_."

Now she's out of bed, her knife in her hand, and when Alvis sits up, she sees it in his eyes: the momentary, stunned flash of defeat.

She still hasn't cleaned her blade of him.

"You got me," Alvis says, horribly calm. "I killed him. But Dutch, for all it's worth, I truly was here tonight because I liked you, nothing else."

She stares at him. Johnny passes her his jacket, and she loves him more than ever for the way "I told you so" is fully absent from his arm around her shoulders.

* * *

It annoys her unbearably that she can't stop herself from pacing, and yet. "Why?"

Alvis is cuffed to one of their chars, probably more pro forma than out of any real need, but how can she say? He's detached, polite, walled off, and not at all like the man she had under her hands just an hour ago.

Looking at him gives her a headache. There's no illusion left in the entire universe that her upbringing had left her untouched, but she believes in the truth of that place they both went to, down and under, and over there, he hasn't struck her as a murderer.

"Brother Tevildo had succumbed to a temptation, and had repented afterwards, and called for me for confession and penitence, but passed on his sin instead. I killed him and took the money, waited. It was the Rain the next day, and it took care of the body."

Johnny is looking disgusted, and she should be, as well. Twenty thousand joy is enough to tempt almost anybody. But…

The recording Johnny had found is playing silently on the screen over his head, over and over. Tevildo, a limping, white-haired man with a slumped back, entering the building. Alvis, slipping out of it some time later. She stares at it without really seeing.

"John," Lucy says suddenly, "I've found the money that I believe is your missing sum. A large amount of anonymous donations coming up to twenty thousand joy was made, through several proxies, to the Westerley hospital over the last three weeks. It's not conclusive but it's highly suggestive."

"What," Johnny says flatly and indignantly into the resulting silence, "the fuck is wrong with you, Akari? They're going to Rain you for this shit, and this hospital doesn't need money _that_ badly. Not to mention, murder!"

She stares at Alvis, at the subtle rising panic in his eyes, and then something drags her eyes up to the recording again. Tevildo, shuffling through the street in his dun yellow robes, head down, steps dragging, a fresh fishhook-shaped scar on his left shoulder.

She knows the scar; she's traced it with his lips and tongue, not two hours ago.

"Lucy," she says slowly, "put up Tevildo's face image from the file, please?"

"No," Alvis says.

"Can you run a reverse analysis? If it's a face with facial implants, can you reconstruct the initial image?"

"Don't," Alvis says.

Johnny sucks the air in behind her. Lucy says, "Presenting a rough calculation."

" _Please_ ," Alvis says, in a voice that she knows by now, "don't."

"Change the eye color to blue, please," Dutch says, and stares at the results: Alvis in the chair, pale and finally terrified, and Alvis on the screen over his back.

"Wow," Johnny says faintly, "I sure did not expect that."

She abruptly sits down.

* * *

"So," Dutch says, calmer than she actually feels, "care to tell me why you were ready to be executed for pretending to kill yourself?"

Alvis is slumped in his chair, rubbing his uncuffed wrists. "You can't understand."

Johnny says, "You have to realize that at this point you need us understand."

Alvis raises his head, looks at her, and she hates the way he looks, suddenly older, defeated. "There's always… dissent, in Westerley. You're outsiders, but even you should have noticed that Company sucks this town dry, and doesn't leave a lot to its people. It makes for a lot of bad feelings. Conversations. Bricks in the windows, from time to time.."

"What does it have to do with anything? Things are always that way."

"The Company wants to stop that. The chairman who came there, we learned," and Dutch notes that "we", "he's not just here for the scenery. They were planning a purge, a huge one. Over five hundred people and their families, the ones deemed the most trouble, all done in one strike. Men, women. Kids."

He gives her a small, crooked smile and it sits weirdly askew on his face. "It's big enough and bad press enough even the Company doesn't quite want to admit to it. Right hand not knowing what the left does, you know? There was only one list, only in one location. One small datachip."

Of course, Dutch thinks. Of course it is.

"I kept Brother Tevildo on hand for some time, just in case for something like this. The general's family are faithful, and so there was an opening… I made myself a fixture in the household, and took the chip. Took the money too so it would look like the chip was an afterthought, an accidental grab. Got out and got rid of the poor Brother. Guess I should have accounted for the RAC's brightest."

"Stealing from your congregation, Alvis?", she says, quietly. "Doesn't your doctrine take it seriously?"

"It does, and there are penances." Her eyes go to the scar on his shoulder, angry and deep, different from the shallow cuts of the blessings. "But my congregation is the whole of Westerley. It had to be done."

He leans forwards suddenly, twists his fingers together. "Please just let it go. Tell them I've done it, tell them about the money, I will convince them I took the datachip on accident and destroyed it. You'll have your Warrant, they'll have their answers, and without the list the strike will be delayed for weeks, months more, my Scarbacks will have time to quietly relocate people, we'll - they'll believe it, too."

He glances at Johnny briefly, sardonic. "Priests and their lust for money, you know. Classic."

"Our power is the same as yours. You're RACs, you're invisible and everywhere because it's known that you're neutral. Just like you, we don't play politics. If it was any of the brothers, I'd denounce them, I'd play it, but with me implicated… We can't afford to be in the open yet, we won't be ready for a long time. I'll have to convince them. Please, Dutch. Please."

"It's the Rain, Alvis," she says gently. "I saw how it kills, and even you won't enjoy it."

He's quiet, implacable. "It's like I told you. Martyrdom is not a requirement, for either of my vocations, but one has to be ready."

"The Warrant is all," she says, and looks down at her hands, her clenched fists. "It's the only thing we swear to. I can't…"

Johnny comes up behind her, leans down on the back of her chair, puts his chin on the top of her head, exhales noisily.

"I hate to be the one to point it out, honestly, but we _do_ work for RAC, not for the Company. Our Warrant was to find the monk, the money and the chip, and technically we do have answers for all those questions."

She whips around to look at him, banging his chin, and he straightens up with a yelp. "What do you mean?"

"Well, the monk is dead, the money's in the hospital, and the chip is what?"

"Destroyed," Alvis breathes out.

"There you go. The exact _details_ of those answers are not necessarily covered under our, well. Doctrine."

He grins at her. "I bet we could cook up a better alibi than Mr. Freak Revolutionary over there, too. And he'll owe us."

If there's a God in the universe, she thinks, be it Alvis' trees or the vengeful goddesses of her childhood or whatever else, there's nothing she's more grateful for than for not killing him when they first met. Her Johnny Jaqobis, stealer of ships and of punchlines.

"You hear that, Alvis? You'll owe us."

"At the very least," Johnny says plaintively, "put a damn sign on the door next time, would you? I was scarred for life."

She throws her head back and laughs, clean and clear, and after a moment Alvis joins in.


End file.
